“I’ve gone from being very male dominant to being surrounded by magnificent women. I can’t help but be a feminist,” says George Miller.

Miller has been many things in his life—a doctor, then a visionary action film director, then a director of an animated franchise about tap-dancing penguins—but “feminist icon” may be a role the 70-year-old filmmaker never expected. And yet, many of the rapturous reactions to his new film, Mad Max; Fury Road, have focused on the dominant role of women in the film, from the fearless Imperator Furiosa played by Charlize Theron to the well-drawn, fascinating quintet of kidnapped wives whom Furiosa spends the film spiriting to safety.

Women had a major impact behind the scenes, too; Miller’s wife, Margaret Sixel, edited the film—“I said, ‘You have to edit this movie, because it won’t look like every other action movie,” Miller recalls. And after hearing her speak on Australian radio, Miller invited famed feminist activist Eve Ensler to visit the set in Namibia to lead a workshop for the actresses who played the wives, to give “perspective on violence against women around the world, particularly in war zones,” in Ensler’s words. “Even though it’s a helter-skelter action movie you have to really prepare the world as much as possible,” Miller explains, adding that Ensler wound up including members of the crew in the workshops as well.

When Miller says he prepared the world of Fury Road as much as possible, he really means it. Not only is the film a return to the post-apocalyptic wasteland he depicted in The Road Warrior, Mad Max, and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but Fury Road itself was more than 15 years in the making, delayed by everything from rainstorms in Australia to the usual studio tinkering. Having storyboarded the entire film with artist Brendan McCarthy, Miller used one of the delays as time to collaborate even further with co-writer Nick Lathouris. “We wrote back stories for not only all the characters, [but] every vehicle, every steering wheel,” Miller says. “That gave it its texture.”

Miller and Lathouris also wound up with extra stories, one of which was written as a novella and was intended to be made as an anime, and another that would be a new film for Tom Hardy’s Max. Miller, like any good filmmaker who has learned to hedge his bets, isn’t sure whether either story will see the light of day. “Having just finished this one, I’ve just got to see how this goes,” he says. “See if I’ve got the appetite to go back into the wasteland.”

The appetite that won’t go away remains Miller’s vivid imagination, which has stuffed Fury Road with ideas and shots and effects so inventive you involuntarily gasp when you see them. Miller, it turns out, does too. “I never thought I’d see those polecats for real,” referring to the warriors swinging on 20-foot poles, attached to moving vehicles, who are at the center of one of the trailer’s many breathtaking shots. “I really thought they’d be C.G. It just looked too unsafe and inviting disaster.”

Not only did the polecats come true—production delays allowed Miller and the team to crack that mystery, as well—but Hardy even wound up swinging on one. Says Miller, “I looked up one day in the desert and there they were, eight of them coming towards me, and I thought, Oh, wow, they’re for real.”

When you can make wild ideas like that come to life, it’s hard to let yourself do anything else, even if Miller swears he never thought he’d return to the barren world he first entered in 1979. “I never intended to make a second movie, let alone a fourth,” he says. “But the story seeds in your head. I’ve become sort of hardwired for the imaginative life. There’s nothing else I can do.”

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